


Virgin Mary Had It Easy

by WyvernQuill



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: (in the last chapter), Christmas, Christmas Fluff, Crack, F/F, F/M, Happy Holidays Everyone!, Humor, Illustrations, Pregnancy, Season 10 Finale? I don't know her, dare i say, think nativity play... in space!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-26
Packaged: 2019-09-07 01:47:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16844683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WyvernQuill/pseuds/WyvernQuill
Summary: "YOU KNOW WHAT, MISSY? NO!" The Doctor exploded. "No, it's not all my fault, none of this is my fault! I wanted to take the team for gingerbread pizza in New New New New York for Christmas, but noooooo, that's notexclusiveenough for the big bad Timelady, she wants nectar from 'that planet with the winged humanoids'-""Hael Six." Nardole supplied helpfully. "Halfway between Hael Five and Hael Seven, lovely on the holidays.""-andyoudecided it was a good idea to eat the ambrosia they offered you instead, it was YOUR decision! I didn't know it was reproduction season on Hael Six, how should I have known!?""It's still your-""MISSY!" The Doctor roared, in his most Oncoming-Storm voice. "I AMNOTTO BLAME FOR YOUR VIRGIN PREGNANCY!""Woah." Bill muttered into the deadly silence following that statement. "My love life is NOT the most messed up in the room, and I'm dating a puddle!"





	1. Christmas Eve

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I fought damn hard to get this first half done in time for Christmas Eve... hope it fills the void left by this years not-Christmas special! The next chapter will be up tomorrow, rest assured.
> 
> This story plays in a timeline that branched off from canon during the last two episodes of S10, more precisely when the Doctor fails to arrive in time to save Bill, and if any of you are interested in what exactly I envisioned to happen instead, feel free to tell me in a comment and I'll put it in the next chapter's end notes.  
> All you have to know for this story is that Missy is alive, well, and has just about proven herself virtuous enough to be taken along on adventures, but not _quite_ enough for the Doctor - who never regenerated - to be fully at ease around her again. Bill, too, is in excellent health, and in an even better mood because Heather is travelling with them. Nardole's... just there.  
> Oh, and I nerfed Heather's Pilot-abilities to be slightly less overpowered (because it's honestly a little ridiculous, what she can do, and I'm trying to build a little tension here...), so if, at any point, you wonder why she doesn't just rearrange a few atoms or locates somebody within seconds... that'll be why.  
> Aaaaand that should be all... enjoy!

"I hate you." Missy hissed, curled up in the copilot's seat as much as her... current predicament allowed. "Hate hate hate you. Haaaaaate you."

"I'm well aware." The Doctor ground out, wrangling with the controls of the dilapidated shuttle that the previous owner had un-lovingly named 'Donkey', for the worrying bray-like sound its engines sometimes emitted mid-flight, and tried his very hardest not to fly them into a moon or some such.

"Nah, don't listen to her!" Bill, at least, seemed to enjoying herself despite the bumpy ride and grumpy Timelady, but that might be due to her sharing the only passenger seat with Heather, who was practically in her lap. "Girl's probably a single moody hormone at the mo, doesn't actually mean a thing she's saying, trust me."

Missy made a valiant attempt to climb over the back of her seat and strangle Bill - and Heather, who actually had the cheek to giggle! - but barely managed to do as much as push herself up, so she slumped back and contented herself with an especially homicidal-sounding (somehow) huff and crossing her arms above her near-grotesquely bulging belly.

"Hate you." She continued. "H-A-T-E Y-O..."

"Correct course, sir." Nardole interrupted pointedly from the navigator's seat. "Five degrees east."

"Yes, yes..." The Doctor fumbled for a switch above him, eyebrows drawing tighter and tighter together. "I'm trying, I'm..."

"Failing. Spectacularly. This is _aaaaall your fault..._ " Missy drawled, and that was the last straw.

"YOU KNOW WHAT, MISSY? NO!" The Doctor exploded. "No, it's not all my fault, none of this is my fault! I wanted to take the team for gingerbread pizza in New New New New York for Christmas, but noooooo, that's not _exclusive_ enough for the big bad Timelady, she wants nectar from 'that planet with the winged humanoids'-"

"Hael Six." Nardole supplied helpfully. "Halfway between Hael Five and Hael Seven, lovely on the holidays."

"-and _you_ decided it was a good idea to eat the ambrosia they offered you instead, it was YOUR decision! I didn't know it was reproduction season on Hael Six, how should I have known!?"

"It's still your-"

"MISSY!" The Doctor roared, in his most Oncoming-Storm voice. "I AM _NOT_ TO BLAME FOR YOUR VIRGIN PREGNANCY!"

"Woah." Bill muttered into the deadly silence following that statement. "My relationship is the healthiest in the room, and I'm dating a puddle!"

"In the cockpit." Heather corrected. She took anything to do with piloting very seriously these days, even if the vehicle being piloted barely deserved to be called a spaceship. "And besides, hey!"

Bill grinned, wrapping her arms tighter around her girlfriend's waist. "You're a hot puddle though."

"Oh, and before either of them says it," Nardole added, tapping the cracked screen on which he had pulled up the universnet's entry on Hael Six, "you owe me twenty pounds each. The Doctor and Missy are _not_ shagging, or she wouldn't be in this predicament."

"See!? That's what I was saying. Your fault." Missy morosely adjusted Nardole's ludicrous Christmas jumper over her grotesquely-swollen tummy. Her own corset hadn't stood a chance against nine months of pregnancy condensed into the five minutes immediately following the ingestion of the ambrosia, and Nardole had weighed the discomfort of wearing only undershirt and jacket in winter against the discomfort of, well, seeing rather more of Missy than he would ever be comfortable to, and surrendered his jumper without argument. "If you'd only put out beforehand, I would've come along for the ghastly pizza, trust-"

"ACTUALLY," Nardole raised his voice, both in volume and pitch. "If _you,_ madam, had put out _at all,_ we never would've been in any danger. The Haeli can only utilise virginal bodies for their surrogacies, and I assume the ship has sailed for those two-"

He jerked his head towards Bill and Heather, who might or might not be feeling each other up, he couldn't quite tell at his angle.

"-so the short straw was all yours, I'm afraid - oh, north now, directly north."

"Oi! What about eyebrows here!?" Missy tried to poke the Doctor (currently busy wrenching the controls northwards), but slightly-further-than-arm's-length was terribly far away when you were nine months pregnant. "I mean, I know he had the one in the skirt, and the one in the short skirt, and the _other_ one in the short skirt, most of his little humanlings actually, and even me on a few memorable occasions, but those were all in different bodies. I'll eat my sonic umbrella if this one ever had his screwdriver all a-buzzin', if ye catch me drift!"

She tried for a cackle, but her lungs seemed oddly compressed, and she couldn't get any of the diaphragm action in that was needed for proper cackling. The Doctor frowned at her wheezing, and she nearly managed to delude herself into thinking he cared for her.

"I have - had - a wife." He said slowly, or as slowly as mild panic permitted. "For 24 years, that was, er, _ample_ opportunity. Besides, while the Haeli cannot distinguish between genders, they do tend to prefer bodies that already come with handy wombs built in."

"Oh, cheers." Missy muttered drily.

"Waaaaaiiit a second." Bill frowned. "You're a virgin? Seriously!? Were you in that vault all your life, because _I'd_ be hitting that, if I didn't have Heather." She paused. "Oh, and if you weren't old and evil, I guess. Still tempted though, sorry babe."

Heather shrugged, unfazed. "I kinda see the appeal." She admitted.

"As flattered as I am to be included in your delightful lesbian threesome fantasies," Missy drawled sardonically, "I'll have you know I am saving myself."

"Who for?" Heather asked.

Another silence fell as they all contemplated this question and realised they knew the answer, and that it made things a good deal more unbearably awkward.

"On the bright side," Nardole finally broke the silence with tremendously false cheer, "if we crash and die, at least we'll not be stuck in this cockpit together anymore!"

"Oh, could we?" Missy whined, clearly loving the prospect. "Puh-leeeeeaaaaase?"

"Missy, NO." The Doctor looked as if he very much wanted to pinch the bridge of his nose, but didn't dare to take his hands off the controls.

"Missy yes?" She attempted to bat her eyelashes at him and pose a tad, but seductive measures turned a good deal more comical if you were bulging oddly around the middle, and wearing a Christmas jumper whose pattern depicted a gaggle of Daleks crowding around a crib with the word EXTERMINATIVITY stitched along the hem.

"I _offered_ to fly you." Heather pointed out. "We'd be in the TARDIS already."

"Yes!" The Doctor's voice was actually getting a little shrill now, possibly due to the return of the mysterious braying sound from somewhere that was likely the location of the engines. "And I told you we're not risking puddlefication with a pregnant Timelady at our hands, not while we have an alternative!"

"Not _much_ of an-"

"Yes _thank you_ Nardole! Engine readings, do you have them? Come on, give me something!"

"I don't-" Oh wonderful, Nardole was panicking too, and sounded downright _squeaky_ with it. "The screen doesn't-"

Heeeee-haaaaaw, the engines brayed.

"Left stabiliser failing." Heather muttered, half in trance, a single thin line of water trickling out from underneath her hair and down her face. "Forward thrusters overheating."

"What?" Nardole squeaked.

"WHAT!?" Bill echoed.

"Oh dear." Missy murmured, gripping the sides of her seat - there were no seatbelts, quite possibly the previous owner had ripped them out and sold them like he had with nearly everything else not vital for keeping the Donkey together and up in the air - and bracing herself. "S'gonna be a bumpy one!"

Heeeeeee-HAAAAWWWW, the engines groaned.

The Doctor cursed in native plutonian, pulling the sonic screwdriver from his coat and pointing it at the controls, but what use was he even thinking that would be?

"Loosing altitude," Heather continued monotonously. "Ground approaching."

HEEEEEEE-HAAAAAAAAAWWWWWW, the engines screamed.

"Stabilisers lost."

Nardole let loose a panicked wail as the Donkey began shaking noticeably.

"Engines sustaining irreparable damage."

Bill hid her face in Heather's shoulder, and that seemed to do the trick.

"Crash immi-"

She blinked.

"Oh, _sod this!_ " Heather snapped, grabbing Nardole's shoulder with one hand, reaching for the Doctor with the other.

He saw what she was doing, of course. The Doctor had been accused of being negligent and uncaring often enough, but when push came to shove he always, _always_ looked to his companions. He saw and met her eyes for the briefest moment, before they flickered over to Missy - Missy, who Heather now realised she would not be able to reach in time, let alone put in the care and attention needed to dematerialise someone in her, ah, current condition safely - and then his eyes met Heather's again, steely resolve in them.

Without hesitation, he lunged for the copilot's seat, away from her outstretched hand, curling himself into a protective shield as best he-

And then the Donkey let out a last, desperate braying sound, and promptly crashed.

Missy blinked awake, and immediately looked down herself.

Ah.

Well. Not a nightmare then. Spiffy.

Throwing the parasite so rudely occupying her womb a dirty glare, she pushed herself up on her elbows, a patchy emergency blanket sliding from her shoulders. Somebody must have carried her from the wreck - remains of the Donkey were smoldering close-by, still barely visible through the hazy, fog-like atmosphere of... wherever they were. Being able to tell location and timezone (albeit _very_ unreliably) by feeling alone had always been the Doctor's field of expertise. She didn't have a clue.

Missy thought back to the crash, and had vague recollections of general panic, some loud noise, and finding whatever part of the Donkey's console she was ultimately thrown onto decepticely soft and Doctor-y, but that was rather it.

She idly wondered if any of their wee companionlings were injured, and which ones she might actually miss a little if they died. Then she wondered if the Doctor was hurt, but immediately clamped down on that line of thought. She already felt the faint nausea of the mildly concussed and heavily pregnant, there was no need to make her stomach plummet any further.

Her hairband had snapped in the crash, and she briefly contemplated whether her hair being down was annoying enough to warrant a hunt for some loose string - she could probably pull one out of what clothes were available to her - but frankly, with how her head was pounding, she was almost glad to have it loose.

Missy then gave getting to her feet a valiant try, but after some terribly undignified scrabbling decided it wasn't really worth the bother, considering somebody had carried her out of the Donkey and would hopefully be around to help her up eventually.

"Doooooctoooor?" She trilled, flopping back down onto her back. "Helloooooooooo... anybody?"

There was a clank-crack-bang from the direction of the Donkey, and a humanoid form was scrambling out of the sizeable hole in its side.

"Missy?" The figure called, hurrying towards her through the fog, and if anyone asked, she would vehemently deny breathing a sigh of relief.

"Doctor!" She plastered her widest grin to her face. "Rock!" She continued, addressing a boulder nearby in much the same way. "Blanket! Sky! Planet!"

"Annoyance." The Doctor drily added, crouching down next to her. "Any broken bones I should know of?"

"Nah, we're good." Missy scrunched up her nose in thought. "Or at least _you_ are, and I'm really, really trying."

She glanced over his shoulder.

"And where are... let me think... Token Human, Deus Ex Puddle, and... oh what the hell, I'm sticking with Comic Relief for that one. Oldies are goldies!"

The Doctor's eyebrows crawled close together, like particularly cross bushy caterpillars. "You know their names, Missy. I _know_ you know their names."

She waved him off dismissively. "Don't get your knickers in a twist, Doctor Who."

"My name-" He started, but trailed off into a listless sigh. "Oh, time's too short. Heather took Bill and Nardole to... well, I'm hoping safety. Might end up being a black hole, she did have to, ah, _jumpstart_ herself a little."

"Oh, optimism! I do love you in a good mood, Doctor..." Missy paused, giving him a slow, evil - well, reformed-evil - smirk. "...Who."

"You're _hilarious."_ The Doctor said, in a tone that implied he himself didn't think so at all, and turned to what seemed to be the board computer, ripped from the Donkey's navigator console and sonic'd into functioning on its own. "The planet we're on iiiis... New Nazareth, by the way. Used to be a military outpost of the Church, as the name evidences, until... oh dear, that sounds nasty."

"Lemme see!" Missy made eager grabby hands, but the Doctor held the computer out of her reach. He seemed to be under the impression she might relapse into villainy if she was overly exposed to evildoings on a certain scale, so he kept all those fun stories about war and genocide well away from her.

"But chances are good that the closest biodome surface post might still have some helpful equipment, or at least provide air that won't choke us to death over the next few hours, because the atmosphere here isn't exactly breathable on the long term."

"Oh, _lovely."_ Missy breathed. Might as well enjoy that privilege as long as it was available to her. "After this, I'm _never_ joining you in any of these silly earth celebrations ever again. Lock me up in the Vault 'til after Boxing Day for all I care, I've got enough of these very-much-denominal holiday revelries that end in suffocation or equivalent danger to my person."

"Oh, go on, you Grinch." The Doctor elbowed her goodnaturedly. "It's Christmas, and this is a Yuletide Adventure! Yes, we're stranded on a near-desolate planet, but we can still preserve the cheer of the season and have fun!"

Missy shot him a glare, gesturing at her still-convex middle.

"'Fun', Doctor, is for when I'm the _only_ one occupying my body, thanks very much. Although..." She contemplatively glanced over at him, not really caring for his eyes being much further up than where her line of sight currently led her. "Inviting certain bits of certain other persons over for the night _could_ be classified as 'Super-Fun'..."

"I'd say 'that's how you get in trouble like this in the first place', but in this case it's really the exact opposite, isn't it?"

"Hur hur." She only accepted his hand for long enough to help her to a standing position, her pride wouldn't allow for anything else.

The Doctor quickly got the computer to calculate the best route to the nearest biodome surface post - the biggest this side of the planet, New Bethlehem - and with an emergency blanket each wrapped around their shoulders, they started walking.

(Missy had tried to talk the Doctor into giving her a piggyback ride, but he'd pointed out that her current proportions didn't quite allow for it.)

"Just by the by," Missy eventually broke the not-quite-companionable-but-certainly-better-than-it-used-to-be silence of trudging through a rocky, foggy wasteland. "Couldn't we have waited at the wreck for Heather and the Puddlettes to pick us up?"

The Doctor shrugged. "I doubt she had the time to take down the coordinates, or place a locating beacon on either of us. So I figured we better not count on it, and do what we can about..." He made a vague gesture in front of his stomach that was likely meant to reference her very-unplanned pregnancy. "...and hope they make our way to us at some point. They're clever things, they'll figure out a way. I hope. We'll need them for..." He repeated the nebulous gesture. "...eventually."

"Pleasepleaseplease tell me I won't have to... actually pop this thing out." Missy stopped mid-step, blanching at the thought.

"Oh, no. Lord, no no no." The Doctor seemed equally horrified, and mildly sickened. "The Haeli infants remain in the host body, until such time that they've drained it entirely of the psychic energy they feed off, at which point their flock removes the baby and integrates them into the Haeli's telepathic net. No giving birth, I promise. The extraction process I have in mind is much more... sanitary."

"Well, small mercies." Missy grimaced. "I'm telling you now, Doctor, if you ever get it into your head to start a new earth-born line of Timelords, you either find us a Loom or yourself another Timelady, because that's not a thing I'll EVER let happen to me again."

"Noted." The Doctor acknowledged with a nod. "I'll try to keep myself from any such propositions, cross my hearts and hope to regenerate."

"Oh, don't worry." Missy murmured into her blanket-shawl, only a tad bitterly. "You're _exceptionally_ good at not propositioning me..."

"What?" The Doctor frowned, half-turning back towards her. "Did you say something?"

"Nothing of consequence, my dear Doctor. Nothing at all."

"You _sure_ you don't want me to help you?"

The Doctor stood on an outcrop a little way ahead of her, watching with a little crease on his forhead - that was mostly swallowed up by his brows - as Missy was fighting her way up the slope.

"I'm managing, thank you!" She snapped. Or gasped as snappily as one could be while highly pregnant and almost out of breath. "I'm a strong, independent Timelady who don't need no Doctor!"

"Of course," he tried to soothe her, "but a helping hand...?"

 _"I'm_ _managing!"_ It had killed Missy every time, to have to beg the Doctor for assistance when her evil scheme du jour derailed terribly - which had been a somewhat common occurence back in the day - so her pride stubbornly insisted to power through this on her own.

Though, by now, Missy was beginning to think her pride should try walking miles and miles in a pregnant state, mostly uphill, on rocky non-paths _and in heels,_ before it made decisions on behalf of the rest of her.

"We're almost there anyway." The Doctor had skipped ahead to the very top of he ridge, and Missy briefly envied him for how ridiculously spry he was, despite his advanced age. Honestly, he moved as if he was still in his first century! "I can see the dome- oh!"

"'Oh'?"Missy staggered after him at as much of a hurry as she could still muster. "'Oh' what!? Doctor, I get these funny feelings in my worry-bone every time you say 'oh' in that voice, so you better reassure me quickly!"

"Well..." The Doctor ran a hand through his hair, and he _really_ needed to get those roots done again. "It seems that 'no survivors' was a bit of a pessimistic estimate."

New Bethlehem was nestled strategically in a valley that might rather be classified as a crater, an entire human-inhabitable biotope encapsuled under a high glass dome. While most of the post's main functions, such as the climate regulation systems, seemed to still be functioning, the army base it had once housed had long since fallen to ruin, likely after the unspecified crisis the Doctor didn't want Missy to know more about.

However, as the Doctor had suggested, apparently there had been just about enough survivors of said crisis to begin repopulation efforts.

Ramshackle wood buildings had sprouted from the ruins, and clearly the architectural stabilisers were working just as well as the other systems, because they grew in an intricate, impossible tangle that put one in mind of an Escher painting, filling out a good percentage of the dome.

It was a little laughable, how the biodome's inhabitants had likely lost all knowledge of _how_ the technology worked by now, and still it kept them alive... and suspended their homes in that crime against architecture.

If any of those systems happened to fail, the New Bethlehemians would be dead within a timespan ranging from the next three generations to a minute, depending on the system.

Missy would be lying if the thought didn't fill her with a certain measure of vindictive glee.

The way down from the ridge was somewhat easier, consisting mostly of slipping and sliding down the slope, and once a very embarrassing tumble.

They were making for an airlock gate leading to an access tunnel branching off from the dome, which the sonic screwdriver would hopefully break them into. Or at least that was the plan, until...

"Doctor, look, look!" Missy pointed excitedly at the airlock gate. "A welcoming comittee!"

The gate slid open with a hiss that tapered off into a wheeze - evidence of the sub-par maintenance this entire post direly suffered from - and revealed a man in a much outdated ratty tunic with some adornments that were likely meant to indicate rank.

"Oi!" He called towards them, peering through the fog. "You 'ave any papers?"

Missy and the Doctor shared a look of mutual 'we don't, do we?'

"Right." Missy sighed theatrically, gathering her skirts (and the low-hanging hem of her over-sized jumper.) "I'll deal with this, you're pants at psychic suggestion."

"Oh no, you-" The Doctor tried to stop her, but she twisted out of his grip.

"Just swallow your pride and let me." Missy stepped up close to the official, fixating on his eyes with her best hypnotic stare.

 **"You,"** she intoned carefully, **"will let us pass."**

It wasn't quite as impressive as back when she'd actually rocked the hypnotist-look - complete with goatee - she was aware of that, but with simple lifeforms such as this it should still work a treat.

So one might imagine her surprise when the official frowned and said "No' without permit or identification, sorry guv'ness."

Missy blinked. "...what?"

Before she could say anything else, the Doctor had pulled her away with a gesture towards the official that probably meant something along the lines of 'a few minutes, my good man'.

"I was about to tell you." He whispered. "The baby is feeding off your psychic energy, you don't have nearly enough left for hypnotic control."

"Oh, _great."_ Missy pinched the bridge of her nose. She was getting mighty sick of this pregnancy lark. "Then what do we do?"

"Provide identification, of course!" The Doctor rummaged in his pockets, producing his sonic, a TARDIS key, the sigil of the High Council he'd nicked off her and promised to return, _that lying cleptomaniac,_ before finally holding up his psychic paper with a triumphant grin. "Ha!"

Missy rolled her eyes. "So, who will we be this time, John Smith and Harriet Saxon? _Again?"_ She huffed, pressing a palm against her aching back. "For our people's ultimate free spirit, you're woefully unimaginative."

The Doctor gave her one of those intense, challenge-accepted looks he'd liked to give her in those good old days of vicious antagonism. " _Watch me."_ He growled at his most Scottish, and dragged her back to the official, pointedly thrusting the psychic paper under his nose.

The official squinted. "Iosef Carpenter and his betrothed, Marya." He glanced up from the paper at Missy's midriff. "Mate, I'd seal the deal quickly, that bun seems about ready to come out of the oven! Honeymoon before the wedding, eh?"

"T'Missus told me she was a virgin!" The Doctor answered jokingly in an outrageously faked accent, and, emulating what he knew of spousal behaviour, did something he feared Missy might not let him live to regret: slapped her bum.

Missy drew in a sharp breath, and her nails were suddenly digging very cruelly into his arm.

"Well, I got me doubts, guv'nor." The official chuckled, stepping to one side and waving them through. "All in order, my best for t'little one."

"Ta!" The Doctor quickly ushered Missy along with an arm around her waist, trying to get her out of earshot before her frigid expression would begin translating into some very choice words.

"I'm not sure which of you two thought himself funnier." She hissed. "I've _read_ that silly bible thing, you know, and-"

"Really?" The Doctor interrupted. "You read the bible?"

"Of course I did. That book inspired an incredible amount of bloodshed, felt like I should. Plus, I needed Christian votes back when I was PM."

"Didn't you just hypnotise everyone so they'd elect you?"

Missy ignored that. "In any case, that was _not_ creative, Doctor, nor was it even _remotely_ funny."

The Doctor pulled his lips into a wide smile, for the officials' sake, who was walking with them along the access tunnel, and was grateful to see Missy do the same. As contrary as she liked to be, neither of them wanted to deliver a baby/extract an alien parasite in a pre-medieval holding cell.

"It absolutely was, you just can't appreciate it with the 'bun'-induced hormones. Sweetcheeks." The Doctor tacked on, because if she was calling him Doctor Who, he might as well retaliate.

Missy's eyes darkened to _just_ this side of... no, actually, it was well within murdery territory and only getting worse.

"Furthermore: slap my posterior again," she forced out through a gritted smile, "and I'll remove a finger for each letter in the word 'molestation'."

The Doctor frowned. "That's eleven." He said slowly. "And I have..." He glanced down at his hand, quickly counting. "...only ten fingers."

"Gee whiz, I'm sure if I'm _creative_ enough I'll find something similar to remove," Missy responded tartly.

The Doctor swallowed.

"Let's find somewhere to stay for the night!" He urged her along, voice only a tiny bit higher than normal, _extremely_ careful about keeping his hands above her waistline. "So you can get the weight off your feet, how about that?"

" _Finally_ you're talking sense." Missy groaned, and, pride be damned, gratefully leaned onto his arm.

"This is getting ridiculous."

"Yes Missy."

"I hate this."

"Yes Missy."

"I hate _you."_

>sigh< " _Yes_ Missy."

"And it's all your fault."

"Yes Mi- No, wait, it's not!"

Missy tugged the emergency blanket tighter around herself, scowling morosely at the ramshackle constructions around them. She was cold, tired, _bloody pregnant,_ and in the kind of mood that had, once upon a better time, caused her to go find the Doctor and start breaking things around him until he paid attention to her.

Since that wasn't an option - the thing currently around him was herself, after all - she merely concocted a lovely little fantasy involving mostly murder and arson. Behaving herself for the Doctor didn't mean a girl couldn't dream.

"Why do you keep blaming me?" The Doctor complained, fiddling with the no-longer-on-board computer and pacing in circles around the little patch of ground she was resting on. "I mean, yes, _I_ used to always blame _you,_ back in the day - sorry about the thing in the death zone, by the way - but in my defense, you were a villain and caused enough mischief that you being responsible was less of a 'possibly' and more of a 'probably'!"

"...ow." Missy said.

"And, sure, sometimes I get us into trouble on these little outings, no denying that. But! But I really don't see how this new predicament is in any way my fault."

"...ow!" Missy said.

"Can I be blamed for half the inn-owners here being xenophobic, and the other half being greedy? It's the circumstances that are conspiring against us, do you think I _made_ everybody here turn us away at the door because we're penniless foreigners?"

 _"Ow!"_ Missy said.

"If anything, _you_ could've tried to appear a little less threatening and more pity-evoking, and not called the last guy... that thing you called him, I swear I _almost_ had him convinced!"

 **"OW!!!"** Missy said, most insistently and at quite the volume.

And the Doctor finally realised that something was... if not _wrong,_ then certainly not entirely right, either.

"Missy...?" He inquired cautiously. "Is something the matter?"

"Noooooo." Missy panted sardonically. "I'm just peachy, no reason to concern yourself with me, those sounds of pain were purely coincidental, _YES OF COURSE SOMETHING'S THE MATTER YOU DOLT!_ "

The Doctor covered the ear closer to her with a grimace. "No need to shout."

"You said I wouldn't actually be giving birth, you _promised_ me I wouldn't!" Missy's voice rose into hysterical territory, her arms wrapped as far as they would go around her bulging midriff. " _Then why does it hurt!? YOU PROMISED ME!_ "

"Calm down, you're _definitely_ not giving birth." The Doctor tapped away at the screen distractedly, doing who-knows-what while wisely keeping out of her immediate vicinity. Even pregnant, her attack range while panicked was impressive, and she was almost close enough to grab his ankle. "It's your body's way of notifying you that the infant Haeli is invading you psychically. Contractions would feel different."

"Oh, because _you'd_ know." Missy would've rolled her eyes if she wasn't genuinely very terrified. "As if you'd recognise a contraction if it bit you in the womb... oh wait! _You don't have one!_ "

"Neither did you, up until one regeneration ago. Deep breaths, Missy. They're phantom pains, trust me."

At this point, she was fully prepared to throw dignity into the wind and _roll_ over to the Doctor if it would give her the satisfaction of physically maiming him.

"Remember the last time you were so very, very certain something was only in my head?" Missy adapted an eerily perfect imitation of his tenth regeneration's voice. " _'The Drums aren't real, Master! They're only- oh, whoops-a-daisy, who'd'a thunk! They ARE real!'_ Not a terribly reassuring track record, Doctor."

The Doctor blinked, momentarily thrown. "That was... rather impressive, actually."

Missy preened, because it was the Doctor complimenting her and she couldn't quite help herself.

"You think so? I almost did the bowtie one, there's an accusation in there involving the Pond girl's pregnancy..."

"How many of me can you do?"

"Oh, almost all of them, just missing Doctor Number Who-Cares-I'm-Having-Non-Contractions-Get-On-With-It."

"Is that one ginger?"

Missy shot him the kind of look that implied she deeply, _deeply_ regretted every single missed opportunity to kill him since the dawn of time and prior.

It was perhaps also a bit pleading, because whatever hippy-dippy nonsense about breathing-through-the-pain-that's-not-real-anyway the Doctor spouted, this bloody hurt and Missy maybe wanted coddling and a hug.

(Not that she was entertaining any hope of getting that, this version of the Doctor was especially bad at the whole empathy schtick. But, again, dour reality didn't ban a girl from dreaming.)

"Can't we just throw someone out and usurp their hovel?" Missy whined, when the Doctor returned to the computer and ignored her nonverbal plea for attention. "I'm freezing and exhausted and it hurts and hurts and hurts, let's suspend our morals just long enough to get this thing out of me!"

"No, Missy. Leaving people out in the cold is not something good guys do. Remember the list I gave you?"

 _"They_ did it." She pouted.

The Doctor raised one brow. Which, with brows like his, was quite the enterprise. "Aaaaand?"

"...and we aren't mean to people just because they were mean to us first." Missy grudgingly recited another part of that damned list.

Saying saccharine goody-two-shoes nonsense like that was a sensation not unlike gargling glass shards, but the Doctor rewarded her with smiles when she did it, and she'd sunken low enough for that to actually be a decent incentive.

"But yes, we ought to find shelter somewhere." The Doctor glanced around himself. "Not _every_ room here is living space. Maybe a storage room..."

He hurried along the net of unstable plank-bridges, leaning haphazardly over railings and peeking not-at-all-subtly into any windows, cracks, or holes in walls he could find, with no care for his own person whatsoever. Such situations were still a little strange to Missy, because she was no longer honour-bound to try and shove the Doctor to what never actually turned out to be his demise, so she found herself fretting about him falling to it without external aid instead.

Genuine worry about the Doctor's wellbeing wasn't exactly a new one, but not actively covering it up with attempts to murder him _was._

Missy would never quite understand how their relationship got so much more complicated the moment they _stopped_ hating each other - or at least stopped making a reasonably good show of it.

"Ha!" The Doctor crowed triumphantly, returning to her in a perilous mixture of racing along narrow walkways and simply jumping down a level or two, once more showing off the simply ludicrous shape he was in.

"Found us something. Up there." He pointed at the topmost room of one of the higher... did they even deserve to be called buildings? "Disused stable, should be suitable."

Missy let him help her to her feet, critically gazing at their potential refuge. "A stable? Up there? How would they even get the livestock in!?"

The Doctor shrugged. "And _that_ is probably why it's disused. Come on now, I'll help you."

"Humans are stupid." Missy grumbled, struggling up a rickety staircase, one arm slung around his shoulders and the other curled around her stomach. "They never _think._ No wonder you're so fond of them, you always did like to be surrounded by your intellectual equals..."

She couldn't be sure, but she thought she saw the Doctor smile only the tiniest bit from the corner of her eyes.

"Then tell me, Missy: how do you explain my friendship with you?"

She could've been witty here, in theory. In practise, however, his casual admittance of them being friends still threw her a little, plus another worryingly-cramp-like stab of pain in her midsection, so she only managed a strangled "oh, be quiet."

Well, _now_ the Doctor full-on grinned.

"Yes Missy!"

Missy was curled up on a pile of something that was more mold than straw in fetal position - oh the irony! - and tried very hard to pretend that the pain was just in her head.

It... still didn't quite work.

So instead, she did her best to make her discomfort very, _very_ known to the Doctor.

"Ow. Ow, ow, ooooooow!" She didn't even really need to fake the sounds of pain at this point. What had, in the beginning, been more of a drawled sing-song, now came quite naturally and realistically.

"Working on it, Missy!" The Doctor shouted over his shoulder, threading cables through the sides of a rotting feeding crib. As he had explained it, he was going to trigger the Haeli's natural ability to teleport if given a suitable signal to follow, forcing the baby to vacate Missy posthaste and appear in the crib instead. It was going to be terribly improvised, but at this point he could hold up a blunt spoon and announce he was just going to _dig_ the damn thing out, she would still be all for it.

"Then work on it faster!" She snapped. "It's- OW! - I-it's getting worse."

The Doctor pointed the sonic at the ex-board computer with a frown of concentration. "Doing what I can, rest assured." The way he knew her, she was likely over-acting an awful lot, and he still had a good ten minutes until matters got really serious.

When she quieted for a bit after that, the Doctor felt validated in his judgement of the situation, and was just rigging up the magnetic field, when...

"Doctor... _please."_ Missy whimpered - yes, actually _whimpered,_ and that was frankly terrifying. "I don't want to regenerate, I don't, not yet, not now, do something, do it quick!"

Oh. Oh well. Ten minutes was maybe pushing it, actually. Five, more like. Three. Two if they were very, very lucky.

"You won't." The Doctor tried for and promptly missed 'reassuringly' by a margin so wide he probably would've ended up closer if he'd tried to fly the TARDIS into it, which, with the Doctor's navigation skills, was saying something.

"Oh, don't you _dare_ mollycoddle me the way you do your stupid humans!" Missy growled, but it was much less acerbic and more whiny than her usual. "I know I'm dying, don't insult my intelligence by pretending I'm not!"

"Well." The Doctor pointedly didn't look up from his work. "Bad news: Yes, you _are_ dying. Good news: No, you _won't_ regenerate. The infant would suck the artron energy right out of you if it came to that."

"WHAT!?" Missy was clearly trying for an outraged shout and pushing herself up, but it was really more of a squeak-wriggle kind of thing. "How is that _good_ news?"

"...because it technically is what you wanted...?" The Doctor tried lamely.

Missy's eyes narrowed. "What I want _right now_ is not something you'd survive, sunshine. Regeneration or not."

Ah, a death threat. The Doctor breathed a relieved sigh. As long as she wasn't too far gone for that, there was hope.

"I think I've got it!" He gave the voltage transformator he'd pinched from the carcass of the Donkey another tweak, and scrambled to his feet. "Almost done, Missy, almost done!"

The doubtful eye she gave him was a little very bleary, but fretting wouldn't really do her any good now, so the Doctor simply dropped to his knees beside her and set to work, alternating between fiddling with his screwdriver's settings and pointing it at the little Haeli whose arrival really was overdue now.

(To preserve Missy's already much-too-strained dignity, he pretended not to notice her clinging desperately to him, pressing her face into his side and getting that particular part of his jacket suspiciously wet, even as she was grievously insulting his person and indicating forcefully he was at fault for all this.)

"Did that do it? I think that did it, I hope it did it!" The Doctor always had a tendency to babble in a panic. "Teleport should engage, I should..."

He tried to make for the crib, but Missy's string of very uncouth insults suddenly broke off into a choked sound of panic, and then resumed more along the lines of _"don't leave me please don't leave me I hate you so much Doctor except I don't never ever leave"_ with her grip tightened to the point of him having to worry about his blood flow.

The Doctor decided those calibrations didn't really need checking anyway, and opted for awkwardly half-hugging Missy to his side instead.

He also tried gentle shushing, but this regeneration wasn't very good at offering comfort, and Missy had never been very good at accepting it.

And then - it was really very anticlimactic, in the end - Missy's form was its usual for-once-not-corsetted slender-ish type again, and there was a baby in the crib.

As was usual for Haeli, the child had two fuzzy white wings protruding from its back, and a golden ruff flaring out around its head. An exceptionally healthy specimen, from what the Doctor could see. It figured, it had been feeding off the psychic energy of one of the most accomplished telepathic manipulators the Timelords had brought forth in generations, after all.

The Doctor briefly contemplated going over to check on the new-'born' more thoroughly, but Missy was still shuddering in his arms, and the little bugger was probably the more resilient of the two at the moment.

She needed him. She always did, usually she was just better at pretending not t-

"D'awwww! Look at its little nose!"

The Doctor and Missy's heads snapped up from where their foreheads had absolutely not rested against each other, and they had absolutely not exchanged vague messages of comfort and... _other sentiments_ over a psychic bond.

Not at all.

The Doctor blinked. "...Bill?"

"Heya!" Bill grinned, one arm slung around Heather's waist. The two of them were covered in blotches of sticky resin - that experts would recognise as myrrh and frankincense respectively - while Nardole, who was cooing at the baby (from a safe distance) was liberally dusted in a golden substance that miiiight be pollen.

"Sorry it took us a bit, Heather dropped us into some alien botanical garden - which was _so cool_ by the way, though a little bitey - and we had a hell of a time just finding each other again. You okay?"

"Ah." The Doctor cleared his throat, awkwardly stumbling to his feet while pulling Missy, who was still uncannily quiet, up with him. "Quite well, thank you, Bill."

Disentangling their arms was a little awkward, but ultimately the Doctor managed, leaving Missy to lean against the wall instead.

"Also, well done, Heather" He added quickly, to cover up any residual traces of awkwardness still stubbornly hanging about. "You found us rather more quickly than I would've thought."

"Oh." Heather smiled softly. "I didn't find you. _She_ did." A little sheepish shrug. "I only followed."

The Doctor's eyes traveled along her pointing finger to the ceiling, and when he couldn't find anything of note there, hurried out onto the platform around the stable to look up on the roof.

There, on the highest building in New Bethlehem, the TARDIS stood proudly, her roof lamp shining brightly as a beacon, putting even the stars to shame.

The Doctor laughed giddily - nothing better than having her appear sometime and -place where he didn't expect her - and then it turned simply into a laugh of happiness.

They were all well, reunited and near the TARDIS, the baby had been delivered safely, and it even seemed like the climate regulation units up above them had decided tonight would be a snow night.

Sure, there had been a tight spot or two somewhere in there, but, ultimately, this was a perfect ending to yet another perfect Christma-

"DOCTOR!" Came the panicked shout, and the Doctor learned a valuable lesson about speaking and what tended to happen if you did it too soon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And at this cliffhanger (in the proud tradition of Classic!Who) we end today's chapter.
> 
> Merry Christmas - or happy equivalent holiday, or pleasant day-you're-proud-to-be-an-atheist, who cares - and thank you so much for reading my first reckless plunge into the Doctor Who fandom!  
> (Or, well, at least the first story I published. There are a lot of WIPs in my folder, but this one had a clear publishing deadline...)  
> ~WQ


	2. Christmas Day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well. If you go by my timezone, my solemn vow to post the second part of the story on Christmas Day has been broken by... about half an hour.  
> I tried...  
> Enjoy!

The Doctor whirled around just in time to see Missy slide through Bill and Heather's attempts to keep her upright, collapsing in a heap on the floor, and while he would usually doubt the sincerity of that action - she _was_ an unrepentant drama queen - there was plenty of evidence this was absolutely genuine.

(He even compiled a quick mental list, because mental lists were welcome distractions when your best friend suddenly collapsed and your hearts were up in your throat and plummeting heavily downwards one each. The top three points mentioned how Missy, in any semblance of control over her actions, would try to faint elegantly rather than just crumple, not choose that precise spot to do so - because that one was rather grimy - and certainly not do anything that suggested weakness in front of all their companions, she was reluctant enough to do it with the Doctor alone.)

"What!" He stumbled towards her, sonic already in hand, her pulse, breathing, psychic field, internal damage? _Think, Doctor, figure this out, can't be that hard!_ "Wait... what? Why... what, what, wha-"

And then the Doctor's eyes fell onto the Haeli, contentedly fussing with the tip of its left wing, still looking decidedly sated, and something clicked.

"Oh." He rushed over to the crib, grabbing the computer wired to its side and parsing the readings. "Oh no, no no no. Stupid! Stupid Doctor, idiot Doctor, silly silly Doctor!"

The state he was in was the one Missy liked to refer to as The Ranting Scotsman - coincidentally also the name she would pick if she ever found herself in the position to open a pub - complete with flailing arms, verbal self-flagellation, and aborted attempts to pull out his own eyebrows.

"How could I- IDIOT! I'm thick, so thick, you were so right, I don't think, god!"

"What's happening!?" Nardole squeaked, displaying his uncanny ability to keep a cool head in a crisis... _not._

"The psychic connection wasn't severed!" The Doctor exclaimed, abandoning his eyebrows in favour of tugging frantically at his hair. "I _thought_ it would be, but it isn't, _stupid!"_

He pushed Heather and Bill away from Missy - who was faintly twitching, oh dear oh dear oh dear - and pulled her head in his lap, placing his hands at her temples and concentrating. He'd never been _terribly_ good at psychic blocks, but if there was one thing the Doctor knew about himself, then it was that he only really shone in a crisis.

"The baby's feeding off her mind," the Doctor babbled, giving in to his compulsion to exposition all over the place when uneducated companions were present, "and I thought I'd stopped it, sorry Missy, so sorry, but they're still connected and its instincts are telling it to quickly take what it can get, before... before..."

He swallowed.

"I'm so _stupid."_ The Doctor muttered hoarsely, not even bothering to stiffen when Bill placed a comforting - and resin-sticky - arm around his shoulders.

"Seconded." It was only a faint whisper, but still unmistakeably Missy, her eyes barely fluttering open. "Also, moronic, imbecilic, a total numpty..."

"Right you are, on all counts." The Doctor muttered, and Bill and Heather exchanged a knowing look at the fondness he would likely deny had infiltrated his tone. "No, don't try to move. I doubt you _can,_ all in all."

"Am I still dying?" Missy asked (and was quietly horrified at how it came out weakly rather than dripping with sarcasm), not mentioning how she didn't have particularly much motivation to leave her current position in relation to the Doctor, anyway.

"Er. Yes. Sorry." No mollycoddling, she'd said, so the Doctor would preemptively give sugarcoating a wide berth, as well.

"But not for long, if we have any say in it!" Bill added enthusiastically, and at a volume that made Missy in her tender state wince. "We can save you, can't we? Right, Doctor?"

"Oh yes. Absolutely. Good on you, Bill Potts, an optimistic, forward-thinking nature is a wonderful gift." The Doctor kept his voice very soft, absently petting Missy's hair. "But we'll have to call the Haeli here. If they don't take the babe with them and integrate it properly into their telepathic net, she won't survive the night."

" _'She',"Missy_ hissed weakly, "is going to kill the little bastard first, bare-handed if need be."

(Politely, nobody pointed out how her current constitution rendered her incapable of lifting a single finger, much less commit infanticide.)

"No killing babies, Missy." The Doctor chided gently, tapping her nose in a gesture a hint too affectionately. "We good guys don't do that, remember the list?"

She bared her teeth at him threateningly, but simply that she hadn't attempted to bite the offending finger off indicated how dire the situation was.

"I still have Hael Six's coordinates." Heather offered. "I could bring the baby to them, or vice versa."

"No." The Doctor frowned. "Haeli, being capable of teleporting themselves, don't deal well with being forced to do it. Wouldn't take well to the TARDIS either. We'll need... a telegraph tree, it's their preferred method of communication. They grow all over the Hael system." He sent an image of it into Heather's mind. Ah, the beauty of having a Pilot on hand. "With as many fruits as you can find, it'll have to connect _quite_ the long-distance call."

"On it, boss!" Bill grasped Heather's hand, and together they melted into the floor.

"If you don't mind me asking, sir," Nardole piped up from where he was awkwardly patting the newborn's neck frill. "What message do you intend to send? 'Sorry we bolted, things were moving a little too fast, but we managed to carve your baby out now, come pick it up by four'?"

"In so many words, yes." The Doctor shrugged, prompting a little moan from Missy who didn't appreciate her pillow moving. "But Haelish isn't actually constructed in a way that would make offensive wording of the facts possible, so there's really no need for you to fret."

"No need to fret, he says!" Nardole threw his hands in the air. "Missy's dying in his arms-"

"Again." The two Timelords said in unison.

"-and he says there's no need to fret! Sorry sir, but I reserve my right to agonise over injured teammates as much as I like, thank you very much!" He huffed, crossing his arms. "Now. What can I do to help?"

Missy muttered something suspiciously like "not existing would be a good start", but was ignored.

"I'll need things from the TARDIS." The Doctor began, rattling off a mental list. "Resonance crystals, my amplifier, those golden wires, a car battery and the leftover gingerbread pizza I ordered when Missy wasn't paying attention."

Two incredulous pairs of eyes centered on him.

"What? I'm hungry!" The Doctor tried to defend himself.

"His _'closest friend'"_ (the Doctor wasn't sure he was entirely comfortable with the implied air quotes Nardole was using here) "is being drained of life, and he gets peckish! Un-be-lievable. Sir, sometimes I think a crash course in being a good person would benefit you just as much as her!"

Nardole waggled his finger reprimandingly, but his voice was the well-meaning kind of squeaky, so he was only teasing.

"Shut up and go." The Doctor grumbled, but this too was the benevolent kind of grumble.

Bill and Heather stood in the middle of a snowy little glade on Hael Six - hopefully far from the Haeli settlements and their currently-disgruntled inhabitants - and in front of a telegraph tree.

It bore an uncanny resemblance to a small terrestrial evergreen, except for an abundance of spherical red fruit hanging off its branches, and a yellow-golden star-shaped bulb at its very top.

Heather frowned at it, angling her head this way and that.

"Doesn't it remind you of a-"

"Yup." Bill popped the 'p'. "Totally."

"I'm starting to sense a bit of a seasonal theme."

"Uh-huh."

"I mean, the parallel with the Three Wise Men was much subtler."

"Heather, there was literal _myrrh!"_

"...subtle myrrh?"

"..."

"Fair. Let's just get the tree."

"Yeah. Let's."

"Doctor?" Missy murmured, her eyes closed. "If I die... I suppose it's too much to ask for you to avenge me?"

"We'll do our best to keep you alive and without needing avenging." He responded kindly, patting her shoulder with only minimal awkwardness.

"Aw, you didn't even say the thing."

"What thing?"

"You know, the _thing._ 'No vengeance Missy, we good guys don't do that, remember the list'."

The Doctor smiled sadly. "I won't bind someone by rules I myself don't keep. And..." He leaned in a little closer. "You know me, better than anyone else in the universe. If you really, actually, died here and now, Missy..."

And then there was something in his tone that would've made shivers run down her spine in better circumstances.

" _I would raze the entire Hael system to the ground before you could say 'unhealthy coping mechanisms'._ "

One of her eyes slowly slid open with extreme effort, only to narrow.

"You wouldn't." Not St. Doctor, He Who Is Holier Than Thou. "And the kiddies wouldn't let you."

The Doctor shrugged. "I think they'd help me."

"Nardole, for one, is terrified of me to the point of wetting himself, he'll be glad to be rid of me."

"That's his normal face, he _always_ looks like that."

"I frighten Bill-"

"You've grown on her."

"-and Heather hates me since that experiment where I poured antifreeze into her puddle."

"You said sorry."

"You _made_ me say sorry."

"Same difference, important thing is, she forgave you. Just look at how they were scrambling to find ways to help! They care about you."

"Not quite. _You_ don't want me dead, they don't want you sad, it's just caring about _you_ with more steps."

"Aren't you cynical today..."

"One tends to be, when one's dying."

The Doctor found that the 'I'm dying, just indulge me' discussion strategy Missy was going for here was really terribly hard to argue with, so he was quite happy to be released from the obligation of finding a witty comeback by Nardole stumbling back in with a heap of what couldn't possibly be called anything other than 'junk' in his arms.

The Doctor motioned for him to just dump all of it in his lap - having shifted Missy's head over to his shoulder - and set to work gutting the electronics.

It was a little difficult to coordinate the rewiring of intricate fiddly bits and keeping her brain stems from being sucked dry of all neural activity (plus the added challenge of not spilling tomato-cinnamon sauce over his good jacket), but the Doctor was a genius, after all.

And, well, Missy was still managing to keep her eyes a tiny bit open, and made disapproving noises whenever he tried to attach the wrong fiddly bits to one another, because the Doctor was undeniably a bit of a clot, too.

The Doctor had strung all the crystals onto the gold wire, created an electromagnetic biowave field-generator from the amplifier and the battery - with built-in psychic focus field! - and polished off three slices of what Nardole had had a bite of, and immediately declared a travesty of a pizza worse even than the one with chili and pineapples, when Bill and Heather finally puddled in.

Between them, they carried a telegraph three that was only _juuuuust_ scraping at the ceiling of the stable, looking as if they'd rolled in pine needles and stuffed snow down each other's shirts.

A relationship was only truly sound if it survived chopping down an evergreen together, the Doctor had always thought.

"Took you long enough!" Nardole groused, helping them maneuver it _just so_ to keep it upright without foreign aid.

 _"We didn't even have a_ _saw!"_ Bill snapped back, trying to peel resin-needle clumps off what had been her favourite jacket.

"No fighting!" The Doctor called from his spot at the wall. "Don't make me come over there!"

This was, of course, an empty threat. He couldn't risk breaking physical contact with Missy as long as he was boosting her psychic resistances, and his back loudly counselled against attempting to carry her.

"I need you to do something," he added, holding up the golden wire with the resonance crystals. "Put this on the tree, crystals as evenly spaced as possible, and place this underneath it."

He gestured at the field-generator, which he'd packaged neatly in his blanket to keep all the wiggly bits in.

"And then the trailing ends of the wire around everybody's wrists, this message'll be a team effort."

There was a certain beauty to having companions who did as they were told in a crisis without protest, a luxury the Doctor never appreciated more than when his companion du jour happened to be more on the stubborn side.

Bill, Heather and Nardole were, on average, on the first team, and jumped to it, no questions asked.

Missy meanwhile, had slipped into unresponsiveness, hanging in the Doctor's arm limp like a puppet, and silent safe for a faint whimpering sound now and then she seemed incapable of suppressing.

The Doctor... worried. More and more.

"Soooo..." Nardole adjusted one crystal with a critical eye. "Since you're just sitting there looking pretty, mind telling us what exactly we'll have to do or say for this message?"

Exposition, in the Doctor's opinion, was even better for taking his mind off the dying Timelady in his arms than mental lists were.

"Haelish is not like any language humans have devised. The signals they send out are entirely unique, so the telegraph tree as well as the resonance crystal and the electromagnetic biowave field-generator with psychic capabilities-"

"The present?" Bill asked with a wry smile.

"It's not a... the wrapping is for... ah, never mind. Those are all for translating our message into something the Haeli can receive - when it comes to long-distance Haelish, even the TARDIS is stumped - but we'll still have to start out with a suitably multi-layered message and the right psychic impulses. Just words won't do. The Haeli add telepathic impulses - that's what the generator is for, we can do that - and another pattern of 'speech' in their second throat, which we, obviously, don't have, so we'll have to improvise and add a melody instead."

"So... sing?" Heather cocked her head to one side.

"Yes, but it will have to be the perfect song. One to herald the coming of a long-expected child, our reverence in the face of its arrival, the joy it's brought into the world, possibly also carrying connotations of our location... give me a second, I'll compose one. If only I had my guitar..."

Bill and Heather shared a look.

"Do _you_ wanna...?"

"Nah, feel free."

"Doctor..." Heather piped up. "Wouldn't a Christmas carol do?"

The Doctor blinked.

Thought that through.

"Oh. Actually... yes. Yes, that would work."

"Great!" Bill beamed. "I always used to go 'round carolling when I was little. Got so many cookies, s'not a proper Christmas without!"

The Doctor - not terribly partial to amateur carolling efforts - heaved a long-suffering sigh. "Well, at least you'll be halfway decent then."

"Nah." Bill laughed, wrapping gold wire around the infant's wrist, then her own. "I was rubbish, they bribed me so I'd _stop_ singing."

Another sigh was heaved.

"...wonderful. Just wonderful."

"Alright then." The Doctor once more made certain that the wire was fastened tightly around Missy's wrist as well as his own. _"Silent Night,_ I should think, and try to have reverent thoughts. On four. One, two..."

"Uh, sir?" Nardole raised his hands. "I'm not sure I know all the lyrics to that one."

"It's _Silent Night!"_ Bill burst out. "How can you _not_ know-"

"I might be able to do the first verse," he tried to defend himself, "but the second..."

"Why don't we sing _Las-"_

"Heather, _Last Christmas_ is _not_ an option."

"Never mind!" The Doctor raised his voice over their arguing. Missy's breathing had gone very, very shallow, and if they wanted to squabble they better did it while their _own_ lives were in danger. _"Oh Holy Night,_ that one, first Christmas carol to be broadcasted on radio, how about that one?"

"Oh yeah!" Nardole brightened. "Know that one, I do!"

Bill groaned unhappily. "But I wanna..."

"Compromise!" The Doctor cut in. "We sing the first verse of _Silent Night_ and then transition seamlessly into _Oh Holy Night,_ and Heather's allowed to _think_ of _Last Christmas,_ HAPPY?"

The three all grumbled their assent.

"And if you wouldn't fight while my friend is dying, that'd be just super. On four. One, two, Euler's number, three, pi..."

And then they sang.

Bill was atrocious, Heather was average and a little wobbly in the heights, and Nardole... Nardole actually had a surprisingly impressive voice on him, the Doctor had to admit that.

The crystals in the tree began glowing gently, little sparks running along the wires, and the baby, which had been fussing a little, suddenly fell quiet.

If none of them were dying, the scene could've almost been called beautiful. Idyllic, even.

The Doctor could feel the sound waves gathering in the resonance crystals, translated by the biowave field and directed by the telegraph tree, the melody and their message swirling out through the snow, the fog outside the dome, the endless emptiness of the universe, to find a single little planet out there somewhere in the void, where another lifeform would hear their call and come to them, across miles and miles of airless death.

Which was, now that he thought about it, more of a Christmas miracle than anything the silly humans liked to label thus.

"They're coming, Missy." He whispered under his breath, adjusting the blanket around her with something that was most certainly _not_ tenderness.

There was a soft sound, like wings beating the air, and the gentle hum of Haelian song.

The Doctor smiled, fully, teeth and all.

"They're here."

Four Haeli stood in the entryway, snow catching in their magnificent wings and the traditional white gowns of nursery staff, their neck ruffs spread wide around their heads.

Nardole's lovely tenor got a bit squeaky at the sight of them, but they ignored the choir, immediately zeroing in on the baby with a sound that might be the Haelian equivalent of cooing, gathering it up in their arms, passing the child around.

Finally they held the baby between them in a gesture faintly reminiscent of a demonic ritual, their ruffs glowing...

Missy drew in a sharp gasp, and simultaneously - paradoxically - tensed and relaxed.

The bond was broken.

One of the Haeli gathered the infant to their chest, and, with a swirl of its wings, disappeared in a flash of divine light. Another followed, then a third.

The last one turned to them, golden eyes unblinkingly wandering over one after the other.

Bill stubbornly only sang louder (and more false), reaching for Heather's hand. Nardole briefly faltered - "Don't stop!", the Doctor hissed - but it ignored him.

Its eyes centered on Missy, and it took a step towards her, hands reaching out.

 _"No."_ The Doctor said. Only that, only 'no'.

But it wasn't the Doctor speaking, then.

It was the Imp of the Pandorica, the Destroyer of Skaro, the Doctor of War, the man who would've been ready to kill his entire people if two regenerations' worth of regret and an Impossible Girl hadn't intervened.

He couldn't have made the threat more clear if he'd said 'no more'.

The Haeli flinched back, its empty eyes wide.

Staggered back a few steps.

Turned and ran, wings flaring out and carrying it away in a flash.

They all shared a quiet sigh of relief. Well, all except Nardole, who sniffed critically into the silence. "Hmm. I must say, I've heard better speeches out of you, sir."

"Shut up!" Bill elbowed him. "And I'm teaching you all of Silent Night. Right now."

She pulled him over to the telegra- oh, what the hell, the Christmas tree. Heather made as if to follow them, but paused. Glanced over. "Will she be okay?" She asked, with a nod to Missy.

The Doctor grinned. "Missy," he declared, "will be _so fine."_

This was immediately proven by the finger stabbing him - albeit weakly - between the ribs.

By the Doctor's calculations, going from the average Gallifreyan's brain chemistry, the exact time elapsed since the psychic bond had been instigated, intensified, and cut off respectively, Missy should've completed her full recovery five minutes ago - just when Nardole had mastered the second verse - and was therefore very clearly _choosing_ to keep playing limpet and _wanted_ to heavily lean into the Doctor's side.

Missy knew that the Doctor knew this, and the Doctor knew that she knew that he knew, and so they'd entered a stalemate of mutual knowledge that would persist until:

A) Missy decided that this was as much of a cuddle as their fledgling friendship could get away with while she was still on reformed-villainess-probation;  
or,

B) The Doctor remembered that he'd _meant_ not to encourage... this thing between them Missy wanted desperately and he told himself he didn't.

('C)', which would've been 'another catastrophe occurs', was always a potential option where the Doctor was concerned, but didn't seem likely at this point.)

But since neither of them did anything of the sorts, they remained huddled together, watching the snow fall through the open door and simultaneously cringing when the trio around the tree didn't _quite_ hit _Silent Night'_ s high notes.

Missy eventually began humming along. She was quite good - certainly better than some other present company - and the Doctor found himself wanting to tell her so, but...

If he said anything that wasn't a rebuke now, something might well shift in this precarious equilibrium he'd worked so hard to build between them, and stability was better than risking all for... for something the Doctor didn't even really _want,_ anyway!

(...did he?)

It was a little cruel towards Missy, who had gone against centuries of the War Drums in her head, if not her very nature, just to be his friend again, and a lot cowardly; but the two of them had always brought out the very worst in each other, and he didn't dare speak.

He could have this, only this, for just a minute more, couldn't he?

 _Silent Night_ drew to a close, and Heather enthusiastically launched into _Last Christmas._

"Ugh." Missy murmured. "Philistines."

The Doctor hummed his agreement, not mentioning how she had delighted in belting out the chorus every time he so much as set a foot into the Vault all through the early 2000s... and not restricted to wintertime, either.

(She'd gotten a bit stir-crazier than usual, until the Doctor had caved in '07 and taken her out for a stroll on Christmas Eve, the only time he could be certain there would be no humans around to harm.)

That... had not been a fun half-decade.

Silence fell once more. (The good kind of silence - damn it, the Doctor still flinched every time he came across this phrase!) Or, as silent as it could be, what with Bill now having pulled out her smartphone and making use of the unlimited mobile data he'd installed for her - with galaxy-wide roaming - so their singing was now accompanied by distinctly tinny music.

It was halfway through the next song on the playlist - The First Noël - that the Doctor felt a soft touch at his knuckles, and looked down to see Missy's hand sneakily trying to cover his.

(She was greedy like that, always had been when it came to being tactile with the Doctor.)

Panicking - because holding hands now would send a message he still couldn't admit he _wanted_ sent - he snatched his hand away from hers.

Well. Missy received _that_ message loud and clear, for sure.

"Right." She breathed, stung, and - finally, much too soon - peeled herself off his side, to sit half a pace to his left. "Of course."

Her back was very stiff, and the Doctor had the creeping suspicion she only turned it to him so he wouldn't see her blinking much too frequently. The wall she was now staring at certainly didn't seem to warrant _that_ much attention from where he was sitting...

The Doctor sighed, picking stray tufts of wool from the resin-sticky patches of his coat Missy's jumper had made contact with. This was beginning to be a bit of a familiar dance, drawing closer together while the adventure was in-progress, and then, after, one or the other saying or doing something (alright, _him_ saying or doing something) that pushed them apart again.

Then came frosty, hurt silence, retreating into separate rooms in the TARDIS to mope, and finally pretending nothing had happened come next morning.

(Usually, Bill would leave a brochure for couple's counselling on the TARDIS console and think herself subtle, too.)

Missy would likely make some scathing, hurtful comment to mask her own vulnerability, and that would be any hope of a mutually enjoyable Christmas Eve with stimulating conversation (nothing against the others, but, well... measuring up to Missy's brilliance was difficult) gone, just like that.

The Doctor suddenly deeply regretted pulling his hand away. He would've liked...

On Christmas, at least...

Just a little.

_Please._

Missy took a deep breath. Aaaaaand there was the scathing comment, like clockwork.

"Merry Christmas, Doctor Who." Missy said, softly, and not nearly mocking enough to truly make fun of him. Only very sad, resigned, and a tiny bit choked.

The Doctor's hearts- didn't _break,_ exactly. But they did develop a crack, a tiny, little, _painful_ hairline fissure, and he swallowed hard.

A piece of leftover gingerpizzabread crust hit the side of his head, and he turned to see Bill glaring pointedly at him, more projectiles cradled in her hand - among them a telegraph fruit and a leftover coil of wire - clearly having eavesdropped on him and Missy despite being mid-rendition of Christmas carols.

Strange, how threatening she managed to seem while _still_ singing about universal benediction and divine bliss.

 _What?_ The Doctor mouthed defensively.

Bill gestured first at him, then at Missy, and glared harder.

 _What!?_ The Doctor repeated.

Heather - also turned towards him, had they all been watching? - tapped the ground, and water welled up from nowhere, forming words: _She's really trying, don't be a-_ and the Doctor couldn't quite decipher the last word, but felt that was for the better anyway.

Turning to Nardole in the hope of having at least one ally in his 'be cautious around the ex-villainess'-stance, he was met with a pantomime indicating Nardole's foot, the Doctor, and Nardole's backside, possibly translating to "remember, permission to kick your arse".

Traitors, one and all. Et tu, Nardolus, et tu.

Granted, in defense of their defense... it had been _months_ since any villainous and/or murderous threat of Missy's sounded like she actually meant it, and sometimes it even seemed almost like she... cared.

Not the way normal people cared, no, this was _the Mistress,_ after all, but... in her twisted, back-to-front, anti-social way...

She was here, with him, and nearly died because she'd humoured him in celebrating Christmas, a silly little holiday from a backwater planet, honouring a saviour she didn't believe in from a religion she happily ridiculed, and in reaction to the humiliation of having an alien parasite planted inside her, what had she done?

Slaughtered all Haeli, except one, who would get to live exactly as long as it took to reverse the process and not a second longer?

No, not at all.

She'd let him pull her into a dilapidated wreck of a spaceship, and, no matter how bloated, sick, or miserable she'd felt, not harmed a single hair on any living soul's head, as docile and full of trust in his judgements as usually only his human companions were.

Her past regenerations would be writhing in their graves from shame, if they had any.

There was no doubt about it.

Missy _cared._

The Doctor sighed.

Scratched his head.

Fidgeted a little.

"Missy...?" He tried.

Missy nodded stiffly to indicate she was listening. The Doctor tried hard to pretend her breath wasn't hearts-wrenchingly hitch-y, and wondered briefly if he didn't miss their time of antagonistic oneupmanship.

At least then he'd never been so tongue-tied, and certainly never made her - him, them, whatever - cry.

...at least not openly, and _that_ was a thought so uncomfortably stomach-clench-y to have he dismissed it immediately.

"You..." _Think, Doctor, think. Ignore the nosy audience, fix this, don't be an idiot._ "You didn't actually get to have your Haelian nectar."

_Oh, great job. **Dunce.**_

"After these events, I don't really feel like it anymore." Missy responded, and at least her tone was nearly even now.

"That's a shame." The Doctor wrung his hands. "Hael Six truly is lovely on the holidays, they have this celebration..." He was babbling. That never fixed things.

"We. Ah. We should go there again next year." He concluded hastily.

"Don't be daft." Missy still wouldn't look at him, even though he'd scooted a little closer. "Your little display of dominance might've scared them away now, but they'll be bolder on home soil. One alien brat slopping out o' me was more than enough, ta very much."

"That... that'll only be a problem if you're still a virgin by then."

Missy laughed. It sounded very brittle. "We both know I will be."

_Now, Doctor. Allons-y, Geronimo, and all that nonsense._

He swallowed. "We could. Well. Change that."

It was very quiet all of a sudden, Bill's Christmas playlist the only sound in the room, since their companions were so very intent on eavesdropping.

Missy finally turned to him, strangely wet eyes narrowed into suspicious slits.

"What are you suggesting...?" She asked slowly.

The Doctor shrugged helplessly, picking at his sleeve, suddenly unable to meet her eyes.

"Suggesting. That's the wrong word, I think. I'm more..."

He took a deep breath.

" _...propositioning."_

Missy blinked.

The Doctor rather suspected he hadn't seen her _this_ flabbergasted since he'd suggested to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow in a device that, she'd later forcefully informed him, had never so much as seen a singular neutron, much less a flow of it, whose polarity, by the by, was impossible to reverse, had he paid no attention whatsoever during their n-Dimensional Engineering classes!?

It was, he _also_ rather suspected, not a good sign.

Missy's lips did something akin to a wobble, but there wasn't really enough time to verify because they - and the body connected to them - launched themselves at his own lips until the two were were firmly connected.

The Doctor flailed a little - a silly, nostalgic part of him fondly mused that this was a lot like their first kiss in these regenerations - but carefully didn't make any move that could _possibly_ be construed as pushing her away.

Because even if she got it into her mind to snog him until death - or regeneration - do their mouths parth, he would bravely endure this terrible, unwanted hardship. Only for her sake, of course. He might've gone out on a limb with the affection in general, but that didn't mean he...

...oh. Huh. That was... interesting, what Missy was doing there. Hm. Nearly pleasant, considering the amount of touching and saliva involved, two things the Doctor normally didn't partake in.

Bill was cheering, Heather 'aaaaw!'-ing, and Nardole gagging, but he ignored them all. Really, this was much more enjoyable to do when not surrounded by dead bodies in some form or other. He might never fully get used to it, but, if Missy was enjoying herself...

Speaking of, she'd never been as good as him at impulse control and ignoring people, and he could see from the corner of his (unclosed, of course, he never missed an opportunity to make things more awkward) eyes that she was making a rather rude Gallifreyan gesture in the direction of their companions.

If he remembered correctly, it implied a sentiment roughly along the lines of 'May you regenerate pox-ridden and swarthy'.

And that one meant... oh. Oh dear. He was suddenly very glad the intricacies of Gallifreyan pantomime had been lost with the planet, because otherwise their companions would be entitled to file a lawsuit...

Missy pulled back slightly, lips forming perhaps the first genuine smile he'd ever seen on her. And that was absolutely the only reason he was staring at them.

"You-" He started, but Missy cut him off.

"I know, I know." She sighed theatrically. "Don't even start. 'We good guys don't make rude gestures at others, not even if they deserve it.' What can I say, I'm ever so sorry and fully repentant."

"You look... _happy."_ The Doctor murmured, because it was worth actually saying. He hadn't seen her happy about something other than brutal dismemberment - or the occasional children's cartoon - since their very first regenerations.

"Happy!?" Missy scoffed, draping herself comfortably along his side - and if she wiped her slightly-damp cheeks in the process, no need to comment on that. "That's not my happy face, it's my 'I'm-mentally-planning-the-brutal-dismemberment-of-someone' face."

"You were _smiling!"_

"Naturally. The thought of maiming fills me with divine elation."

The Doctor couldn't help it, he grinned in that way that he had reliably been informed made his face look as if pure joy was bursting through its very seams.

"You're incorrigible." He grumbled, and if he maybe pressed a kiss into her hair, that was really nobody's business, and... _WAS BILL TAKING PICTURES!?_

Missy and the Doctor exchanged only a brief glance, before they both lurched forward to make a grab for Bill's phone and the potential blackmail material contained therein.

"And I would've thought getting some might loosen you up a little." Bill pouted, eyeing her phone where it was safely contained in the Doctor's jacket pocket.

"You can ask for it back after class." The Doctor retorted lightly, settling down beside them, Missy instantly attaching herself to his side.

...he was never going to sit alone anywhere ever again, was he?

"What about the Christmas songs?" Heather tried to argue.

The Doctor pulled out his sonic, clicked through a few settings, until it began playing a buzz-y rendition of _Jingle Bells_ that was only of slightly worse sound quality than the speakers of Bill's phone.

"'Foiled again!'" Missy drawled. "'Curse you, Doctor, curse you!' Just in case you needed your lines, dearies."

"Missy," the Doctor glared not-quite-sternly. "Do we good guys mock others?"

"This one does, deal with it."

For a while, the five of them just sat in companionable silence, enjoying the true perfect ending to a not-at-all-perfect Christmas.

Except, the Doctor had never been good with idleness. It gave him those strange impulses to babble and hijack TARDISes and fly them to the end of time and space and back. Missy suffered of something similar, but she found that the urges to take over a planet or two were being restrained marvellously when cuddling with the Doctor was the alternative.

"I know what we could do for Boxing Day!" The Doctor suddenly burst out, once all the idyllic calm finally got too much for him. "Have you ever been to Old Krexia? Sure, it's near-constantly at war with Middle-Aged Krexia, but oh, to dance on the frozen lake while the napalm-balloons fly... it's surprisingly picturesque. Oh, or we could go see if we can't witness the Christmas Truce of 1914, very touching, I'll do my best to get the timing right so we avoid the actual fighting, yes?"

Everybody stiffened. Looks of alarmed horror were exchanged.

"Or, there's this unnamed alien race, look _exactly_ like the human idea of Christmas elves! ...we'd just have to mind the claws."

 _Do something!_ Bill mouthed urgently at Missy, with Heather nodding beside her, and Nardole looking as if he were about to make a puddle.

Missy frowned. _What should I-_

_Don't. Care. Stop him, now that he's your bloody boyfriend he might as well also be your bloody responsibility!_

Well. If that was the price she had to pay, Missy considered it one well worth paying.

(Besides, it was not like any of those options sounded any more appealing to her than they did to the humanlings-and-variations-thereupon. She was really not partial to dodging death more than once per holiday.)

"Now, look here, m'lad." Missy forcefully turned his head towards her, and kept it in a position where she could keep intense eye contact. "I doubt this'll work, you might just get cross with me for trying, but I'm taking one for the team, be proud of me for that."

She cleared her throat, and her mind, in preparation for a nifty spot of hypnotism.

" **Doctor, I'll tell you what we'll do for Boxing Day. We're not going to take the TARDIS for a spin. We're not going to just pop over anywhere just to see the sights. We're not going to meddle. With _anything._ What we ARE going to do is stay in; have a nice dinner of conventional foodstuffs, preferably Mexican; snuggle up on the couch, and have a Mary Poppins marathon, except the 2062 remake, that one's just an embarrassment to the franchise-**"

"Oi!" Nardole whined. "Why does Missy get to pick the food and movies?"

"Because, dear, I'm the one putting the work in here. **And, finally, I will spend a lot of time and effort to lure you under a mistletoe, and you will evade me just long enough to make it a challenge, but not so much that frustration sets in. Are we clear on that?** "

The Doctor glanced past her, at Bill and Heather, who were both nodding grimly, and Nardole, who looked more on the imploring side.

"Yes. Fine. I know when I'm overruled," the Doctor huffed, but, _give thanks to all that is good in the universe,_ seemed to accept the democratic vote. "No trips on Boxing Day."

Deeply relieved, Bill and Heather relaxed back into an embrace, Nardole nibbled on a piece of gingercrust - it was growing on him - and Missy fiddled nonchalantly with the hem of her jumper - whose horrendous ugliness would definitely _not_ be growing on her anytime soon - until the Doctor discreetly lifted his arm and pretended to look the other way as she snuggled into his side.

"...but what about New Year's?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Compliments of the season once more!  
> Hope you enjoyed, this is the story wrapped up, the last chapter will be drawings, and up tomorrow on Boxing Day.  
> At least I'll be _'trying'_ again...  
> Thank you for the lovely comments, so glad I could brighten up your winter days!
> 
> (Oh, and it has been suggested to me that the repeated discussion of, ehem, _carnal matters,_ might warrant a T rating. What does the Collective Conscious of the Internet think? If yes, I'll happily change it!)


	3. Boxing Day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaaand some drawings, to round this story out.  
> (And, boy, my tablet sure does not want to make embedding pictures easy...)

New Bethledome

The STAR-DIS

Blackmail Material

Perfect Ending

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, that's it, then, first Who fic completed.  
> I have a Christmas-themed comic I might post soon, we'll see, but for now I'm just happy to have finished this in time and that so many lovely people enjoyed it.  
> EDIT: Did post the comic, so, if you're in the mood for more holiday-themed Twissy shenanigans...
> 
> One last Happy Holidays, and a Happy New Year in a few days' time!


End file.
